


Last Night on Earth

by battle_cat



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mid-Canon, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-06-28
Packaged: 2020-05-28 06:08:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19388083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: He had not intended to get off the bus when it stopped directly in front of Crowley’s building, but here they were.





	Last Night on Earth

He had not intended to get off the bus when it stopped directly in front of Crowley’s building. He still had not exactly said yes to the offer of staying at Crowley’s flat. But the demon had drunk half a bottle of wine while they waited for the bus, and the other half on the way to London, and Heaven knows how much energy he had expended on freezing time and imagining his way successfully through a flaming motorway and all that.

They had sat next to each other on the bus, like friends, instead of one a row behind the other like spies. By the end of the ride Crowley’s head was starting to drift occasionally in the direction of Aziraphale’s shoulder, and when he stood up he needed a moment to catch his balance, and all in all Aziraphale had figured it would be better to at least help him inside.

It had turned out to be a wise decision, because Crowley had taken two steps toward the building and then swayed alarmingly. Aziraphale had caught him and surreptitiously miracled the building door open and followed his mumbled directions to an upper floor.

And so they were inside Crowley’s flat. Inside Crowley’s bedroom, to be exact.

Like the rest of the flat, it was cavernous and nearly empty, the sparse furniture luxurious but a bit impersonal. The bed was massive, the wine-colored sheets a mess.

Crowley stumbled over to the bed, pausing just long enough to deposit his sunglasses on a bedside table. Then he flopped down on the bed face-first and fully clothed. After a moment there was some annoyed wiggling as he kicked off his shoes.

Aziraphale stood next to the bed for a good count of ten, trying to figure out what was supposed to happen next. “I’ll, um…be on the couch, then?” he tried finally.

“Haven’t got one,” Crowley mumbled. Which, given what seemed to be his extremely nominal commitment to the idea of human furniture, was not surprising. But…

“Don’t be a moron, angel.” Crowley, still face down among the pillows, flopped out an arm and patted the mattress next to him.

“I, um…well…” He fidgeted in place for another count of ten before he worked up the courage to think, _Well…fuck it._ It’s not like he could get any _more_ Damned at this point.

There was a Louis XIV-style chair near the bed, which Aziraphale strongly suspected had actually belonged to Louis XIV. He removed his jacket, waistcoat and bowtie and set them carefully on the chair, then took off his shoes and eased into the bed.

It was, in fact, very comfortable. Memory foam or one of those new-fangled things, perhaps. And now that he was here, he realized how incredibly tired he was, even though his body was still humming with all the emergency response chemicals that the almost-end-of-the-world had generated. Angels and demons, strictly speaking, do not need to sleep. But the human body has its limits, and it really works much better if you let it rest now and then.

He lay down as carefully as he could, on his back, a perfectly reasonable distance away from Crowley, who was sprawled sideways across two-thirds of the mattress.

Crowley made a sleepy _hnnh_ noise, then turned over to curl up on his side. Then he rolled right over and flopped an arm over Aziraphale’s chest.

“Oh.” Aziraphale said to no one in particular. “Um…”

He shifted a little, with the intent of doing…what, he wasn’t quite sure. Regardless of intent, the net result was that Crowley nestled even closer to him, close enough to rest his head on Aziraphale’s shoulder.

Aziraphale froze. They were never this close to each other, never, except for the times Aziraphale managed to goad the demon into shoving him against the nearest hard surface. (It worked more often than it should.) Now Crowley was tucked next to his side, breathing softly, in a configuration some might describe as _snuggling._

Crowley smelled quite overpoweringly of burning car, and underneath that—Aziraphale realized with a pang—burning bookshop. His hair was rather damp and disheveled, and his head was heavy enough on Aziraphale’s shoulder that he could already anticipate the moment his arm would fall asleep and he’d have to move into some new, other configuration that could quite possibly also resemble snuggling.

It was wonderful. 

It felt so painfully, terrifyingly _real_ and _good_ and _right_ he wondered if a human heart could collapse upon itself from overwhelm alone.

“Your heart’s pounding,” Crowley mumbled, as if he’d been listening in.

“Adrenaline.” He managed a breathy laugh. “Hell of a survival system those humans have.”

“You don’t…object to this…do you?” Crowley said it slowly, without moving, but when you are that close to someone, you can feel the tiniest changes in their body, the minuscule flinch of bracing for rejection.

“No,” he said before he could think too much about it. “No, it’s”— _say it, just say it_ —“it’s nice.”

“Good.” The flicker of tension went out of Crowley’s body. “You’re warm.” He curled a little closer, and it seemed to make sense for Aziraphale to wrap his arm around Crowley’s angular shoulders, so that’s what he did.

Aziraphale lay there, staring up at the ceiling and feeling the weight and shape and warmth of Crowley’s physical body next to him, and the searing metaphysical heat of Crowley’s love radiating off him in waves. It was a restless thing, always moving and shifting and changing, but always, always there.

Love was everywhere on Earth. Humans, for all their faults, were full of it. Most of the time, love was just background radiation, a kaleidoscope image with so many pieces you couldn’t single one out. But now that he’d really, fully identified Crowley’s particular love, it _blazed,_ an unmistakable beacon whiting out everything else around it.

He’d always thought…that’s just what demons felt like. It wasn’t like he was in the habit of hanging around a great variety of them. He’d always just thought of it as The Crowley Feeling, the thing that told him _Crowley’s here_ before any human sense did.

He couldn’t remember a time when being around Crowley hadn’t felt like that. Now that he’d identified it, it seemed impossible that he could have thought it was anything else. But then, the signal of a particular love gets easier to pick out of the background noise when it’s reciprocated.

How had he been so blind, so stupid and so _afraid_ for so many millennia? The thought provoked an unexpected flash of anger. They could have had _centuries,_ they could have had _thousands of years_ of nights like this, if he had been a little braver, a little sooner—

Except…they couldn’t have. He knew that. Heaven and Hell would have never allowed it, and they wouldn’t allow it now. They would find them. They would separate them, and then they would kill them.

“They’ll come after us, won’t they,” he said quietly, not sure whether Crowley was still awake. “Heaven and Hell.”

“Yeah.” Crowley didn’t even sound afraid; he just sounded exhausted. “But right now they’re busy talking their armies down from six thousand years of apocalyptic bloodlust, so I’d say we’ve got until morning.”

Aziraphale wrapped his arm tighter around Crowley’s back. He lay there, staring at the ceiling, long after the demon’s body had gone slack with sleep next to him. He lay there and he thought about Heaven and Hell, about angels and demons and witches, about sides and loyalties and God’s plan, and about the scrap of paper containing a single prophecy from Agnes Nutter, currently tucked in his waistcoat pocket.

Slowly, very slowly, the vague outlines of an idea began to form, an idea that by the first light of morning had become a plan. It was an insane plan, and its success seemed highly improbable, as insane and improbable as an angel and a demon falling in love. But then again, stranger things had happened at the almost-end-of-the-world.

**Author's Note:**

> Am I in this fandom now? I guess so. Come say hi on [Tumblr!](http://fuckyeahisawthat.tumblr.com)


End file.
